


Kin and Country

by Sorrel



Category: Fallout 4
Genre: Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, F/M, Multi, badass bisexuals with super powers, i ship deacon and emotional self-awareness, lies and the lying liars who tell them, marriage level 1000, no ship like partnership
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-24
Updated: 2016-12-12
Packaged: 2018-08-16 14:56:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 18,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8106652
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sorrel/pseuds/Sorrel
Summary: In the year 2059, the US Army created the Division of Exceptional Individuals, in response to China's increasing use of Augmented soldiers on the battlefield.  Now the Division's best and brightest are the only two survivors of the nuclear holocaust that burned their world to cinders... except for their son, taken by the Institute to further its mad experiments.  They signed up to save the world, once upon a time.  This wasn't exactly the world they pictured saving, but they're willing to be flexible.In which Deacon is Mystique, Quinn is Wolverine, Jack is the ghost in the machine, and the Institute took a page or two out of Weapon X's playbook.  The Division had a motto: "When all else fails, call the cavalry."Looks like the cavalry's arrived.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I have literally no excuse for writing this. I just got the bug and I have no self-control. This went through like five re-writes before it made it to this final version, too, so I've spent even more time on this than it looks like.
> 
> Also, for the record: Quinn and Jack's names are not a Harley & Joker reference. Pure coincidence, and by the time I noticed the names had already stuck. Sorry in advance.

"-na. Quinna! Quinn, baby, you've got to wake up. You've got to get out of here."

Quinn comes back to consciousness shivering, aware of a rictus of pain in her fingers and her skull. When she manages to drag her eyes open, it's to the sight of her fingers curled into claws against the glass of the pod, knuckles still showing traces of half-frozen blood from where she'd beat her fists against the glass. The headache turns out to be radiating out into her temples from the backs of her ears, the insertion points of her commplants aching in a way they haven't since the day they were put in.

"...Jack?" she says, her voice barely a whisper. "That you?"

A sigh of relief in her ears. No, from around her- his voice is coming from some kind of speaker system. "It's me, love. C'mon, you've got to get out of here. They cycled out all the life support to the pods half an hour ago. I managed to override it to start your warm up protocol instead, but that's not going to last forever."

She blinks hazily at the foggy glass in front of her. The pod. She's in the pod. It was supposed to be a 'decontamination chamber' but then it froze-

"Who's 'they?' Vault-Tec?"

A harsh breath. "If I knew I'd tell you, darling."

"Right." Her brain comes the rest of the way back online, bringing with it the memory of- "Shaun! They took Shaun! Those sons of bitches took Shaun and they-" She can picture it so clearly in her mind. The woman in the clean suit had pulled at Shaun, trying to take him from Jack, and Jack had struggled, and the guy with the scar had- "And they shot you. Jack. They shot you and you-" She grinds to a halt. "And you-"

"Come on, sweetheart," Jack says, very gently. "Get out of the pod."

The manual release switch isn't hard to find, once she starts looking, and she gets the sticky door open with a trio of frenzied kicks, spilling out into the comparative warmth of the room. Jack's pod is right across from her, which means she doesn't have time to prepare, doesn't have time to brace herself for the sight of his craggy, beloved face gone slack and cold in death.

"No," she whispers. "But you're talking to me, you're-"

"You always hypothesized that a serious enough cardiac event would cause me to go into full disconnect," Jack's voice says, still from the pod behind her. She rubs fitfully at the implant node behind her ear. They're probably damaged from the cold- no, she can't think about that now. "It turns out you were right after all, love. You know how much you like to be right."

_Not about this. Never about this._ "You're in the system," she says. It's not very hard to put together, now that she's awake enough to realize what's happened. "They shot you and you were dying and you went into the system."

"We always knew this day would come eventually, my dear," Jack says softly. She can hear the faint metallic whine behind his voice, the crackle of cheap speakers making him sound tinny, artificial. False. "You were always going to outlive me."

"I know," she says. She goes over to his pod, flicks on the manual override and listens to the hiss as it opens. "But I didn't want it to be like this."

_Not so soon,_ she means, and his sigh of agreement is like wind through the trees. There were so many things they had left to do together. Lazy mornings in bed, candlelit dinners, weekends spent at the park, shared sunsets from that European vacation they always meant to take. His arm around her, the bulk of him against her side, shoring her up. Memories she was supposed to be able to store against the day when he'd pass and she'd just keep on living, down the long lonely years without him.

The child they would raise together. The legacy they'd carry forward, a boy who would grow into a man with Jack's blue eyes and stubborn chin and her blood running in his veins. Their gift to the future.

Rage makes her tremble, but her fingers are steady on the pod door as she pries it open. The rush of frosty air smells like ice and chemicals and death and _Jack._ She swallows hard against the familiar taste of him on her tongue, the last she’ll ever have, as she sets her hand to Jack's ice-cold cheek.

"It should have been me," she says. "If he'd shot me-"

"I know," he says. "But you've taken enough bullets for me, over the years. Our luck was bound to run out eventually."

She uses two fingers to close his staring eyes, then feels into his shaggy hair for the earpieces. It might be a while until she can get her commplants working again, and she's not going to face the world without Jack in her ear. She pulls them off and wipes off the frost on the front of her Vault suit. Slides them onto her ears and tucks the mic lines down the collar of her Vault-suit, laying them out against the side of her throat. The collar will do to keep them in place until she can find some adhesive.

"Initiate," she says, and hears the familiar whirring hum of them powering up and syncing to her vocal chords. It's been years since she's had to wear these, but she still knows how they work. "Testing," she says, and then there's a low, sub-tone _beep_ and finally, finally Jack's voice comes through clear.

"Not perfect, of course," he says, and his voice is a little distorted but still so clearly _Jack_ that she has to close her eyes in relief. "But it will do until we can work up something better."

"Nothing's ever good enough for you," she says, something like a sob caught in her throat, and he makes a noise of mock-offense that's more reassuring than it has any right to be.

"Not true, Quinna Mae. I've called you perfect every day since you were foolish enough to say yes when I asked you to marry me."

She clears her throat, tries to keep the shake out of her voice. "It doesn't count if it's not out loud, pal."

He makes an amused noise. "Well, all I can do these days is talk, so how about I tell you every day from here on out, hmm? Does that work for you, my dear?"

She rubs the pads of her fingers over the wedding ring she put on his finger five years ago, then pulls it off and slides it onto her thumb. Curls her hand into a fist to keep it there. If she can find some twine or wire, she'll put it around her neck. But until then, it's staying on her hand where it belongs. "You've got yourself a deal."

"Good," Jack says. "Now, what _do_ you say we get you out of here, hm? This whole place is a mausoleum, and fuck only knows what the surface looks like after the bomb."

"Yeah," she says. She strains her hearing as far as it can go, but she can’t hear pick up any sounds of movement, any signs of life: just the groan of the pipes and the laboring pulse of machinery long past its expiration date. "And then we find Shaun."

He gives a low hum of approval. "You and me, darling-"

"Partners till the end," she finishes. It’s a familiar refrain, forged over many years and countless battles. Her body and his will, a perfect symphony of united purpose. "I wasn't imagining something this literal, but I'm adaptable." There’s an ominous pause where his next witticism should be, and she clears her throat. “Babe?”

"I hope you mean that," he tells her, sounding about as tentative as Jack ever does.

She frowns as she pries at the emergency exit door. "Why?"

"Because from the limited information I've been able to get out of this goat-fucking system, it's 2287. You've been down here for a little over two hundred years."

**~*~**

Outside, the world is dead.

Well, mostly dead.

"Those old Vault-tec videos never said there'd be giant lizard monsters," Quinn mutters. A few yards away, the beast paces and growls, close enough that she can smell the metallic stink of old blood on the hot wash of its breath. "I remember absolutely zero lizard monsters in the nuclear preparedness guides."

"They're called deathclaws," Preston says helpfully from her left. Quinn looks at the talons sprouting out of its massive paws.

"I can see why."

"I can't see anything," Jack grumbles in her ear. "I mean, there's a life signs detector on this thing, but all I can see is a blur of something very large and very warm, which I don't think is tremendously helpful-"

"Any good place to hit this thing?" she asks Preston, over the sound of her husband’s complaining. "Out of curiosity?"

Preston squints at her. "Does it _look_ like it has a weak spot?”

The deathclaw mutters its dissatisfaction with lunch that has the discourtesy to lock itself out of reach, and starts pacing off around the corner. Not exactly out of sight, out of mind, but at least she can’t smell the raider that it ate five minutes ago anymore. Dogmeat leans against her thigh and whoofs softly, nose pointed directly to the spot there the deathclaw is hiding very badly out of sight. _Well, at least *someone* is trying to be helpful._

Right on time: "Well, _I_ can't tell if it looks like anything," Jack says, sounding unbearably British the way he does when he's being particularly obnoxious, and Quinn growls in pure wordless frustration.

"Oh my god, _shut up_."

"Sorry, sorry-" Preston says, eyes wide. Dogmeat looks up at her and whines, ears flattened in guilty distress. Quinn lets out a breath, long and slow, and drops her hand to his head, smooths it gently over his fur. It’s not his fault, or Preston’s either. It’s not _anybody’s_ fault, except whatever asshole pushed the button that ended the world, and that guy is pretty firmly out of her reach.

"Not _you,_ ” she tells him, and then looks over at Preston. “And not you either. I’ve got an earpiece in, okay?” God, do they even still have wireless communication? “This asshole on the other end of the line keeps distracting me. It’s nothing to do with you.”

“Um,” Preston says. His face reads _I’m stuck in a death trap with a crazy lady_ as clear as day. Funny how so specific an emotion is so incredibly familiar to her. _Jack, why do you always do this to me?_

And speaking of- "Asshole, I like that. Just because I'm crippled by a severe technological deficit-"

_Why, why did I have to marry someone that always has to have the last word?_ "Jack, I swear to god if you don’t come up with something helpful in the next five seconds-"

"The heat signature is thicker on the belly," Jack cuts in, thankfully before she has to think up some kind of threat that would actually apply to a non-corporeal consciousness. _Not like you can just threaten to sneak bleach into his hair gel anymore, can you, Quinna Mae?_ "Or what I'm assuming is the belly. The scales are probably at their thinnest there. _Assuming this thing has scales._ "

"It's a lizard monster, of course it has scales!" She looks over at Preston. "Jack says go for the belly. Thoughts?"

Preston's face lights up. Apparently it doesn’t matter if she’s crazy, as long as she’s got a plan. "Yeah, that makes sense."

"Good. Here's what we're going to do." She grabs the frag mine out of her jacket pocket- a parting gift from the raider boss with the big mouth, god rest the grisly bastard’s soul- and a roll of duct tape off the nearby shelf. “I’m going to get out there and distract him. When I’ve got it’s attention, I need you to shoot it in the leg. Slow it down, cripple it if you can, but this isn’t going to work if I can’t get clear in time. Can you handle that?”

Prestone pales, but straightens upward with a creak of hinges and nods resolutely. “Yeah. Yeah, I got it. But what are you going to do?”

“Something stupid,” Jack sighs, and Quinn sticks the wad of duct tape to the back of the mine and twists the key to arm it.

“Something stupid, probably,” she admits. Jack, ominously, says nothing. “Ready?”

Preston nods grimly, raises his gun and cranks it once, twice. “Ready.”

Jack clears his throat. “I’m not ready,” he informs her, and she smiles to herself before she takes a deep breath and eases out the door.

_Wow, that thing is really big,_ she thinks. She can’t really see more than an outline of it, with only its tail in clear view of the flickering streetlight, but its arms look damn near as long as she is.

“I might have slightly overestimated my abilities here,” she admits under her breath. “Uh, Preston? Any chance you could engineer a distraction for me here?”

“You’re supposed to be the distraction!” Preston whispers back harshly. The deathclaw turns back towards them, slowly, ponderously. The massive head lifts, scenting the air. “What do you expect me to do?”

“I don’t know, but I need to get past him in order to draw him down the street, and there’s no way I can-”

"Quinn, the dog!" Jack says, and she pivots to see Dogmeat go hurtling past her, a darker blur against the pavement, too fast and too small for the deathclaw to reach it. Damned if it doesn't try, though, turning with a roar and bounding after him, long ground-eating strides that shake the entire street.

" _Fuck,_ " Quinn says, heartfelt, and then, "Preston, now!" as she breaks into a sprint after them. If she can just get in range-

A moment later she hears the booming whine of Preston's laser musket behind her, and a splash of red impacts with the deathclaw's left haunch. _Good aim,_ she thinks, as it staggers and roars in pain, and dives into a forward roll, aiming into the sweet spot between its legs and its dangling paws, arm outstretched-

She feels the mine slap into place with a click, and rolls away frantically, feeling hot spikes of pain down her back and sides where the beast’s giant paws scrabble for purchase against her makeshift armor. A claw hits her bare wrist with with a _crunch_ and then she’s on her feet and running, screaming to get down, get clear, go go go-

The mine goes off. A second later, half the street follows suit.

There’s always a long pause after an explosion, where it seems like the entire world goes quiet. This one seems to go on longer than usual, and Quinn just stands there, staring blankly at the blackened crater where the deathclaw was standing just a moment ago. It takes a second to realize what must have happened- the edge of the initial explosion must have caught one of the old cars left lying around, which much has set off a chain reaction when on the rest. When she got here an hour ago, the street looked like a ghost town. Now it looks like a war zone.

_All the comforts of home,_ she thinks, and slowly pivots, taking stock of her surroundings. The ringing in her ears is a little disconcerting, but she’s not so bad off she can’t do a headcheck. Dogmeat, trotting down the street towards her and looking none the worse for the wear: check. Preston, wedging the power armor out through the hardware store’s crumbling doorway, sooty but unharmed: check. Jack-

She can't hear Jack.

"Jack?" she says, and then, more urgently, "Jack!"

"-here, I'm here, Quinna, I'm still here-" she hears, fading back in like a badly-tuned radio, and she almost collapses from relief.

"Jesus Christ, don't scare me like that."

"Don't scare _you?_ " The sheer disbelief is as familiar as his voice in her ear, and she closes her eyes, savors the sound of Jack being angry about her doing stupid shit. "Of all the hare-brained, reckless, _idiotic_ things I've seen you do, this _still doesn't top the list,_ because I _can't see you do anything,_ honestly, this thing all but slices and dices and makes Julienne fries, why the bloody hell couldn't someone see fit to include a goddamned camera-"

"I love you too, baby," she says, soft and sincere, and he falls silent.

“Look at what a mess you’ve made of this place,” he says, after a moment. “Two hundred-plus years, and apparently some things don’t change.”

“Probably a bit too much to expect,” she says, limping back towards the end of the street. Dogmeat catches up to her, whines and shoves his nose against the patch of road rash on her thigh, but she just shoves his head affectionately away. He’ll learn soon enough, if he decides to stick around. She’s not the kind you worry over. “But just think of how bored you’d get if they did.”

“I think I might like to try it, just for the sake of novelty,” Jack muses. “There’s got to be someone in this godforsaken wasteland who can teach you a little bit of subtlety. Lord knows I was never successful.”

“That’s because you’re just as bad as me, really,” Quinn says. “You hide it under that stuffy academic facade, but you like explosions just as much as the next- Hey, Preston. Everything still intact?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Preston says, waving it off. “But hol-y hell, lady. You are one crazy sonofagun, you know that?”

"It's kind of my trademark," Quinn admits. She's starting to feel seriously woozy. Probably just her punctured eardrum, not healing up too fast because her body’s prioritizing the cuts on her back. "You get used to it."

"You most certainly _do not,_ " Jack says frostily.

"Yeah, I'm not so sure about that," Preston says skeptically. Then his gaze, wandering over her, zooms down to her right hand. "Hey, that looks like blood on your sleeve. Are you sure you-"

Quinn looks down, and sees the blood on her sleeve, all right, but nothing else outside of it. "Hmm," she says, and raises her hand. Or, well, _tries_ to raise her hand. It's more like raising her wrist. The bloody _stump_ of her wrist, with bits of shattered bone sticking out, and blood oozing out thick and fast. "Huh. Guess the bastard got me worse than I thought.”

"Aww, shit," Preston groans, and Quinn would reassure him, really, tell him not to worry, but just then the front door opens, and Marcy sticks her head out.

"We saw the deathclaw go down, is everyone-"

"Uh," Quinn says, but doesn't move fast enough to hide her missing hand before Marcy's gaze zeroes in on it. "Um."

That's about when the screaming starts.

**~*~**

"In retrospect, that probably could have been a better introduction."

"You think?" Quinn snaps. She’s sitting cross-legged on the hood of her rusted-out old Corvega, cleaning off her new machete with her good hand and watching the little knot of survivors argue in the the neighbor's driveway. Dogmeat is stretched out on the hood next to her, assiduously licking his paws clean of ash and road dirt. “They obviously don’t know anything about Augments, Jacko. They probably think I’m worse than that deathclaw back there.”

“Well now that’s just excessive,” Jack snorts. “You’re much smaller, for one thing. Considerably less scaled. Much less fearsome, except for first thing in the morning-”

“You are the worst,” she tells him, but she’s smiling. “The actual, literal worst. Why do I put up with this?”

“You took my ring, you took the rest too,” Jack says smugly. “You knew what you were getting into when you married me.”

“I did,” she says. “For better or worse, right?” Neither of them says it, but she knows they’re both thinking it: _this wasn’t exactly what we had in mind._ “Jack, I-”

“Hey,” she hears, and looks up to see Preston standing in front of her, head cocked quizzically to the side. Not carrying his rifle; she can see it propped up against the side of the house. “You okay?”

“I’m always okay,” she says, feeling the bitter stretch of her smile, and jerks her chin towards the other survivors before he can try to think up a response. “What about you? What’d the council decide?”

“What? Oh, them. They’re fine, just a little freaked out.” He peers at her right sleeve, but she keeps it firmly down to her side and out of view. She can just about move her fingers again, but that doesn’t mean it’s a pretty sight. “I mean, everyone’s heard of gammas, but nobody’s really _met_ one.”

_Huh._ “Gammas, is that what you call them?”

“You called yourselves something different?” Preston says. “Before the bomb?”

She raises an eyebrow. “So y’all have decided I’m telling the truth about that, at least?”

“Yeah, well.” Preston shoves his hands in his pockets. “Mama Murphy vouched for you, said she saw it happen. And your, uh, robot, he was pretty convincing.”

“Yeah,” she says. She can hear him in the house, the burbling click of his fusion engine and the slightly out-of-tune humming as he assiduously scrubs the dining room table to ‘clean up for company.’ “I couldn’t believe he was still here, either.”

“Those old Mr. Handy units were pretty solid.”

“Apparently.” She rubs idly at a patch of rust on the machete’s hilt. _Please don’t kick me out of town. It’s all I’ve got left._ “So if nobody’s met a gamma, than what do you call Mama Murphy?”

Preston scratches his jaw. “I dunno, really. Never much thought about it. Chems give her the Sight, is all. Doesn’t seem much like the stories you hear about the guy who can outrun a radstorm, or lift a whole car over his head, y’know?” He peers at her. “Why, you think she’s one of you?”

“No,” Quinn says definitively, suppressing a shiver. “I’ve met watchers, people who could far-see… But never anyone who could look into the future. Chems or no chems. It’s not supposed to be possible.”

“True clairvoyance was the holy grail of augmentation research,” Jack says. “There has never been a single substantiated case of someone accurately predicting the future using nothing but their talent. Trust me, I would know.”

“Guess there’s some stuff even you don’t know, then,” Preston says.

“I’d say there’s a whole bunch of stuff I don’t know,” Quinn says, with a smile. “Like whatever the hell a deathclaw is, just for example.”

“Didn’t seem to slow you down any, though.” Preston hunches his shoulders and smiles back, a little bashful. “I didn’t get a chance to say earlier, with all the screaming and everything… It’s real great, what you did for us back there. Even Marcy admitted it, once she got over the shock. You didn’t have to get involved, but you did, and we’re alive because of you. So, thanks.”

Quinn smiles and digs her fingers into Dogmeat’s ruff. “The dog was the real hero,” she says. Dogmeat’s tail thumps happily against the windshield. “I just happened to be in the right place at the right time.”

Jack snorts. “You know there’s a point, darling, where humility just gets ridiculous.”

“Sure, okay,” Preston says, looking at her a little askance. “Still, it’s appreciated. You don’t see much of that anymore. Most folks are just worried about their own skin.”

“Most folks can’t regrow theirs.”

Preston smiles, showing teeth that are just a little crooked, slightly stained. _Guess they don’t have much in the way of dentistry in the wasteland._ “Can’t argue with that.”

And awkward little silence falls between them: Quinn can’t think of how to segue into _are they still looking to get rid of the weirdo who can regrow her own body parts,_ and Preston’s got a look like he wants to ask something else but can’t bring himself to do it, either. She rubs the polishing cloth along the machete’s hilt. Preston shuffles his feet.

“Ask him about the synth thing,” Jack says.

She frowns. “What synth thing?”

“That Marcy woman said you were a synth,” Jack says. “Back in the museum. She seemed very perturbed about it.”

“You heard that?” Preston says, and it takes a second before she realizes he was responding to her question to Jack, not to Jack’s response. _Got to figure out if this Pip-boy has some speakers in it somewhere, this is getting ridiculous._ “Marcy didn’t mean anything by it. She was just nervous.”

“Nervous is certainly _a_ word for it,” Jack says dryly. “‘Hysteria’ is probably more accurate, though you can’t blame her given the circumstances.”

“No, I mean I don’t know what that is,” Quinn says to Preston. _Then again, maybe it’s better if Jack can’t talk to anyone but me._ “I just woke up, remember? What’s a synth?”

“Oh,” Preston says, and rubs the back of his neck. “Uh. Synths are like… robots, I guess? And some are made to look just like people. Supposedly you can’t tell the difference.”

“Good lord,” Jack says. “This future just keeps getting stranger.”

Quinn doesn’t bother to tell him to hush. He’s not wrong. “Who makes them?”

“Group called the Institute. Nobody knows much about ‘em. Sometimes people disappear, and everyone says it’s the Institute, and sometimes you find someone acting strange, and people say that’s a synth, sent to replace them. I don’t know if I buy it, but… I mean, the rumors about their coursers? Kinda can’t blame Marcy for freaking when she saw your hand. Supposedly they’re just like you.”

_Well, that’s interesting._ “You mean they can heal?” Minor regenerative talents are a dime a dozen among Augments; evolution, as Jack's always been fond of pointing out, does tend to be focused on survival of the fittest. But there were never many on her level; only three that existed in official record, and likely not more than double that number off the record. Then again, that was two hundred years ago.

“Yeah, among other stuff. Stronger, faster. Rumor is, you can’t hide from ‘em ‘cause they can hear your pulse, and you can’t run from ‘em ‘cause they can track your scent, and you can’t kill ‘em ‘cause they always come back. Scary shit, if it’s real.”

“Yeah,” Quinn says, through a mouth gone dry. For once, Jack is blessedly silent. “Real scary shit.”

“Anyway. Mama vouched for you, said your story was true, and if you were actually a courser we wouldn’t be standing here, so. Must be true. I’m just sayin’, Marcy wasn’t the only one a little freaked.”

“Yeah.” Her mind is working a mile a minute, but it doesn’t take a college degree to see the obvious when it’s right in front of her nose. “Can’t blame her, I guess. Does this mean I’m not getting kicked out?”

Her distraction makes her blurt out the question with no preamble, and in her ear Jack groans. “You could have asked that a _little_ more gracefully, sweetheart,” he chides, but Preston’s eyes are going wide with surprise.

“Naw, no way, this is your place! We wouldn’t do that.” He shifts, nervously. “We were- I mean, we were kinda hoping you’d stick around, actually. Mama says you’ve got a mission, but we could really use your help. For a little while, I mean. If you can.”

The strain in his voice brings her wandering attention back to his face, and even she can recognize the expression she sees there: hope. Desperate, unqualified hope, the look of a drowning man who’s seeing a rope hanging just above his hand. Like he knows all he needs is just that one extra inch, before he can start pulling himself back out.

“Oh, darling, no,” Jack says. “You know we can’t. Shaun’s out there, somewhere. We have to go find him.”

She has to bite down on her cheek not to yell at Jack: _I know, I was there, I’ll never forget that face-_ "And how do you think we're going to find our son, Jack, huh? What piece of intelligence are we going to move on first? The two scientists in clean suits where we couldn't even see their faces, or the piece of hired muscle with a trail colder than those cryopods?"

"You don't know that."

"Yeah? And how _exactly_ are we supposed to start tracking them down? You know I couldn't-" _Smell anything,_ she almost says, and then realizes that Preston is still standing there, listening avidly, and hastily substitutes, "-find anything on our way out. We don't even have a name. You think 'merc with a scar on his face' is going be uncommon?"

"Okay," Jack says, in his best, _You're being irrational, darling_ voice that makes her want to wrap her hands around his neck and shake that condescending look off his face. "But that just means we treat this like an op. The first step is _get intel,_ not 'get sidetracked helping some stragglers because they look particularly pathetic.'"

Ugh. "No, it means we use the tiny fraction of common sense that you have left after that fancy college degree and think about what it _means,_ that they came in and took him. Not us, just him. Haven't you thought about why?" _Think, baby,_ she wills him, unwilling to say it with Preston standing in front of her. _Put it together._

"Oh," Jack says, very softly. "Oh, no, please don't tell me that you think that-"

"Um," Preston says, and winces very slightly when she turns to face him. She takes a deep breath and lets it out slow, trying to school away whatever it was that he saw on her face. "Are you- Sorry, it's just I couldn't help but- I mean, you're saying you had a kid in that vault with you? And someone took him?"

"Someone, yeah." She digs her fingers into Dogmeat's ruff to keep from curling them into a fist. "We don't know who yet, or why, or… anything. I mean, for me it was… yesterday. Basically."

Preston's face contracts in sympathy. “And you really do have someone on the other end of the- line, or whatever. You’re really talking to someone.”

As opposed to crazy, he means. “Yeah, I’m really talking to someone,” she says. “My partner, Jack. He’s-” Fuck, how to explain someone whose body is a half-mile underground but still talking in her ear? “He’s still in his cryopod, technically, but he can reach me as long as I have this.” She brandishes her Pip-boy. Preston still looks skeptical. “It’s complicated.”

“Yeah, no kidding,” Preston says. He curls in on himself a little, barely visible under his big coat, but she can hear his heart rate pick up, hear the tension in his voice. “Um, well, you seem like you’ve got a lot going on. And your kid, I mean, that’s your _kid,_ you’ve got to find him. I get it.”

She looks at his face, the way he’s holding himself so still, so blank. Another disappointment, in a seemingly-endless line of them.

She knows how that feels.

“No,” she says, and waits for Jack's objection. When none is forthcoming, she says, “No, I can help. _We_ can help. I don’t know how long, but-”

“Yes,” Preston says, cutting her off. The light is coming back into his eyes now, slow but coming faster. The terrible kiss of hope. “Yes, anything you can do. I promise, you won’t regret it.”

“I know I won’t,” she says. She lifts up her right hand, wiggles the fingers. A little sore, still, where the nerves haven’t settled yet, but basically fine. “Quinn Hunter. At your service.”

Preston eyes her hand a little warily, then takes a breath and grabs it with his own. When it fails to fall off, or explode, or do anything but sit there and be a hand, the biggest grin goes across his face, and he pumps it enthusiastically. “Preston Garvey. Nice to meet you. You know, officially.”

“Sure thing, pal,” she says, surreptitiously flexing her newly regrown fingers. Jesus, the kid has a hell of a grip. “It’s going to be great.”

“Was that such a good idea?” Jack inquires, when Preston bounds off to tell the others the good news. “If what you think is true- not that I'm saying it _is,_ mind you, but if you're right-"

"If I'm right, then we need intel more than ever," Quinn says. She knows she's right about this, she just needs to get Jack onto the same page. He’s always been the smart one, but he tends to lose sight of the details sometimes. Too busy looking for the bigger picture to see the missing piece. "You heard Preston, this Institute isn't much more than a rumor for people. We're not going to get anywhere if we just wandering around asking a bunch of questions, drawing the wrong kind of attention. This thing with the Minutemen, there might not be much left, but at least it's a known entity. It won't raise as many red flags for the target."

"Hmm," Jack says, which is basically his way of admitting she's right without having to go through the pain of saying the words out loud. "Fine, sweetheart. We'll try it your way for a while. But I reserve the right to call Plan B if it looks like we're not getting anywhere."

"Yeah, that's what I have you for," she says, relief making her insides watery. They're really going to do this. "To tell me when I'm going off course."

Jack makes a mock-offended noise. "That's one of the _many_ things you have me for, Quinna Mae. I am a man of layers. Facets, even. I am vast and contain multitudes."

"You sound like an advertisement for one of the Robco swiss army multitool things."

"There's no need to be hurtful." A long pause. "Do you really think it's him?"

No need to ask for clarification. "You heard Preston," she says, keeping her voice low. She doesn't want to risk this part of the conversation being overheard. "There's a group of people out there who can make robots that look like people, and they're fast, strong, have an enhanced sense of smell and hearing, and they can _heal._ What are the odds?"

"Unfortunately I don't have my calculator handy-"

"Oh, darn."

"-but I'm going to tentatively place them at _not exceedingly high,_ " Jack continues, ignoring her. "Your particular set of talents is unique, to say the least."

"I know Shaun was way too young to get tested, but we always knew he'd most likely take after me. When you hear hoofbeats-"

"Assume horses, not zebras, yes, I know." Jack sighs. "You're right. It's the most likely explanation."

"Yeah." She's not particularly happy to have him agree with her, but she also believes in facing facts. "It's a big target. And a big haystack."

"Luckily for us, then, that we have two of the best operatives the DEI ever trained to put on the case."

She smiles down at her hands. Jack and his ego; two things she can always count on. "Luckily for them, too," she says, nodding to the ragtag group of survivors. As she watches, Mama Murphy turns and looks at her, faded blue eyes somehow piercing even from across the road. Quinn shivers and looks away. "They need every bit of help they can get."

"Well, you can say that again," Jack says sourly. "I suppose it's what we were trained to do."

"See, now, that's the spirit." She grins, cheered as always by his bad mood. "Cheer up, Jacko. This is the part we're good at."

He sighs. “‘When all else fails-’”

“‘Call the cavalry,’” she finishes. “Seems like the world doesn’t remember much about us anymore, but that’s okay.” She picks up her machete, slides the rag down the blade and admires her reflection in its surface. “We’re going to remind them.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Deacon shows up in the next chapter, stg. I just needed to get some worldbuilding off my chest first.


	2. Chapter 2

The first time he sees her-

(Well, the _first_ time he sees her, it's on her way out of Diamond City's gates: a pistol on each hip and a rucksack on her back, a big wastes hound ranging out ahead of her. Danny calls, "Good luck out there, Miss Quinn!" and she raises a hand in a wave but doesn't slow down, out the gates and out of sight in a matter of moments.

"Who was _that?_ " Deacon says, and Danny grins and shoves his hands in his pockets.

"That's the new General of the Minutemen. Guess she's gone lookin' for Mister Valentine, something about a missing person. She's really somethin', huh?"

"Sure is," Deacon says, and is gone at shift change.)

The first time he _meets_ her, rather, is when he's enjoying a drink down at the Rail, for certain definitions of the word "enjoy." Word is that Valentine came here on a case and never came back, so it was a pretty safe bet that this would be her next stop. And after the show Hancock made at the entrance, Daisy sent her to talk to Irma at the Memory Den, which which means that she should be coming down here for a drink right about… now.

If this was one of those old-world vids, heads would be turning when she walked down the steps, but this isn't exactly a vid and she's pretty clearly not looking for attention. Or at least not attention of that kind. She might have left most of her armor behind at the Rex along with her dog and that redheaded brawler who was fighting for caps at the Combat Zone up until yesterday, but the empty holsters tell the sad tale of a merc who fell afoul of Ham's "nothing bigger than a breadbox" policy. All she's got left is the combat knife sticking out of her boot and a scowl that could cut glass.

He's not exactly sure what he expected from the new Minutemen general, given that until a month ago he was pretty sure they were done for, but whatever he _was_ expecting, he’s pretty sure she's not it. There’s no flash, no spit and polish, no shiny uniform and tin badge like that actually means anything worth a damn, just denim and leather and a smudge of dirt down the side of her jaw, where she missed a spot when she was scrubbing up in the hotel sink. If Danny hadn’t pointed her out to him, he wouldn’t have thought of her as anyone but just another merc, shinier than most, ready and waiting for the Commonwealth to chew her up and spit her back out.

It’s definitely her, though. That face is unmistakable. America the post-apocalyptic melting pot, yadda yadda, but you still don't see many people that look like they've got a little Chinese Red in their family tree. _Or_ many people with skin that free of rad rash. That Pip-boy strapped to her left wrist gives a pretty good explanation to the latter. Good old-fashioned spycraft should take care of the rest.

She bellies up to the bar, and Deacon watches her from three stools down, head down like he's not listening to her conversation. Such as it is. It's a little hard to get a read on a person from: "Beer?" "Caps?" "Ten." "Here." The chatty type, she ain't.

She tips back the beer as soon as she’s got it, finishing it down in three long swallows without stopping to breathe. Deacon would think she’s showing off, except he knows that look on her face. She’s not playing to an audience right now, just driving for oblivion, as fast as her caps can take her. It seems out of character; she looks too healthy to be a junkie and too steady to be a drunk. Then again, the Memory Den can make addicts out of the strongest souls, if they don’t know what they’re getting themselves into.

He’ll know soon enough.

“Another,” she says, nodding to Charlie, but Deacon has a stack of caps down on the bar before she can reach into her pocket.

“It’s on me,” he says, and she takes a long, slow breath in through her nose before she turns around. Her almond-shaped eyes are wide with surprise when she looks up at him, but he’s used to that: people don’t expect that such a big man can move so quietly. It takes him the better part of a day to put on the size for this cover, but it’s an easy sell for a job: the only thing Hancock likes better than a big ghoul with a gun is a bigger, meaner-looking bastard, with a bigger gun. Deacon always thought the knife scar on his cheek was a particularly nice touch.

“Who are you?” she says. Her voice tight, tense, her eyes burning a hole in his forehead. This close, he can see that they’re an incongruously pale shade of steely blue.

“Nobody,” he says, holding up his hands. “Saw you goin’ into the Den, is all. Everybody had a first time sometime, y’know? Just thought you could use a drink. Nothin’ meant by it.”

Her eyes flicker over his face, head cocked slightly like she’s listening for the truth in his words. He holds still and doesn’t press his case, focuses on the goggle strap behind her ear instead of trying for eye contact, and is rewarded for his patience with a short, clipped nod.

“Thanks,” she says, and he nods and makes his escape to an empty back table.

_That went well,_ he thinks. He figures that he’s got a half-hour, maybe forty minutes before he can head out again without raising suspicion, but it’s not a hardship to listen to Magnolia and there’s plenty of people-watching to do. Not her; he keeps his back firmly to the bar, not wanting to appear overly invested. He made his approach, made sure he’d stand out as a friendly face on a bad day, and that’s plenty enough for day one. The rest of the plan can wait until he’s sure about the right way in.

He’s thinking that hiring on might be his best play. She’s obviously got a habit of taking in strays, judging by the junkie currently holed up in the Rex on her dime. Give it a week, maybe two, and if he can engineer another run-in he might see if he can get her to pick him up for a job, work his way up from there. He’ll have to pull off just the right kind of desperate-but-proud, but maybe-

“This seat taken?”

He looks up to see the woman herself, standing a foot away from the table with a half-full bottle of whiskey in one hand and two glasses in the other. He opens his mouth, then shuts it again when he can’t think of a single damn thing to say. It’s rare that someone manages to surprise him.

She shifts from one foot to the other, awkward. “Or I can go,” she says, leaning ever-so-slightly back towards the bar. “If you don’t want to be bothered-”

_Don’t fuck this up,_ he tells himself, and kicks his brain back into gear. “No!” he says, a little too forceful, just a little awkward. A bruiser who’s not used to pretty ladies paying him attention of the positive kind. “Just surprised me is all.” He makes himself smile, knows that it stretches the scar on his cheek to nearly grotesque, but she doesn’t flinch. “Not used to people buyin’.”

She slides into the chair across from him, all liquid grace. She’s short, a little stocky even without the bulk of her armor, but she moves like a dancer, perfect poise and perfect control. “Their loss,” she says. “Not many people do a kindness for a stranger.”

She’s got just a hint of a drawl, telling him that whatever vault she came up in, it wasn’t local. Not a surprise; he’s got eyes on 81, and she didn’t learn to shoot straight in a vault basement. Some of them didn’t hold up so well to the test of time, and have to send out their best and brightest to scavenge for whatever they need to keep the lights on. He’s pretty sure she’s not from the Capital, either. A little further south, most likely: Richmond, maybe Raleigh.

“Hancock pays well,” he says with a shrug. “I can afford it.”

“Still.” She sets down the bottle, holds out her hand across the table. “I’m Quinn.”

No mention of her title. Laying low, or just not the type to puff up her own consequence? “John,” he says, taking her hand in his much larger one and shaking firmly. Plenty of callous on her palm, but the skin on the back of her hand is like silk, no nicks or burns or scratches. Vault living might be soft in comparison to the wasteland, but nobody with that many empty holsters spent their entire life in comfort. “Nice to meet you.”

“Likewise.” She pours a generous portion into the first glass and slides it across the table. He wraps his fingers around the glass, watches her pour a matching portion for herself. “To making new friends?”

_Well, that’s promising._ “I’ll always drink to that,” he says, then clinks his glass against hers and downs it. It goes down like liquid fire, and it takes every ounce of practice he has not to cough. Quinn doesn’t so much as bat an eyelash as she swallows, and he looks at his empty glass and decides he’s going to make the next one last, no matter what she toasts. “This your first time in Goodneighbor?”

“That obvious, huh?” Her smile is a little rueful, but her hands are still perfectly steady as she pours another two glasses. This one he sips, wishing he’d thought to palm away the two beers he’d had for show earlier. His metabolism is always shit so soon after a change, and Charlie’s paint-thinner whiskey is a bit much for his head. “Yeah. You could say I’m new in town.”

It seems like the perfect opening to push, but- too perfect, maybe. Every instinct he’s got is screaming at him to leave it be, and he didn’t get this far by ignoring them. “Good thing you found a new friend, then,” he says instead, and is rewarded by the slow bloom of a smile, like he’s passed some kind of test.

“Good thing,” she agrees, and takes another sip of her drink.

**~*~**

Over their second drink they trade work stories: him with some fabricated tales of business for Hancock, her with the work she’s been doing with the Minutemen. Still not admitting she’s their new leader, he can’t help but note, but he does get out of her the fact that she stumbled over them her first day in the Commonwealth, which tells him where and when to start looking.

“It sounds interesting,” he says, with a merc’s dubious opinion of a bunch of do-gooders.

Her pale eyes laugh at him. “Running errands, mostly,” she corrects. “A message here, a favor there. Nothing too important.”

He thinks back to the report that crossed his desk a few weeks ago, a nest of raiders that were cleaned out of Corvega. There were at least a couple dozen of them, with a ruthless sonofabitch at the head, and their bodies were left stripped and tossed into a pile outside the front door, with the Minutemen symbol painted in blue on the wall behind them. The runner who reported it said that there were only two sets of tracks near the pile: one size-small boot tread and a dog’s paw prints tracked in the blood.

“Taking out some trash?” he suggests, and her pale mouth curves into a pleased smile.

“Something like that.”

By the third drink he’s learned a few other things, too: she prefers pistols to rifles, a long blade more than a knife, and heavy armor to light. She smiles easily and often, wide enough to show her perfect white teeth, with laugh lines around her eyes and mouth that tell him she’s not just doing it to charm him. She’s stubbornly evasive about life in the vault but doesn’t particularly try to be subtle about changing the subject, and she’s willing enough to talk about what it’s like coming to the surface after, the culture shock and the gap between expectations and reality.

“Not like I thought it was going to be some kind of technological utopia or anything,” she says, laughing. “Just, I guess I kind of thought these guys would be common, at least?” She shakes her wrist, the one with the Pip-boy on it. “Robco was starting to manufacture them for the army before the bomb dropped. When I was younger, they used to tell us that everyone would have one of these some day.”

It’s the first he’s heard that, about the pre-War army, but then a vaultie would have access to historical records that he doesn’t. “Pip-boy’s not the only thing you’ve got going,” he says, nodding to the plastic buds in her ears. He didn’t notice them at first, the lighting in here being what could charitably called “forgiving” and the devices colored to match her skin tone, but he spotted them when she leaned forward with his second refill, the lamplight shining briefly against the hard plastic. “What are those, anyway?”

“Oh, um, hearing aids?” The lilted upturn of her voice turns it almost into a question; her slow blink says she’s surprised he noticed. “Had a grenade go off too close to my head when I was younger, you know how it is.”

“Stimpaks can’t do everything,” he agrees. _When I was younger,_ that definitely implies she used to scavenge for her vault. “Whose grenade?”

“My own, if you can believe it,” she says, rolling her eyes. A little relieved that he’s letting the subject get changed. “I had a bad habit of counting too slow, and-”

She’s good at spinning a tale, too, with a storyteller’s knack for finding the little details that keep the listener interested. And she doesn’t go on about her exploits, either; she’d rather play things down than brag, a rarity for someone in her line of work. (By which he means a mercenary: she might be leading the Minutemen, such as they are, but she’s not going out of her way to advertise the fact.) She’s slow to answer questions, but she's not shy of offering her opinion once it’s solicited, and she doesn’t hesitate to defend it when it’s challenged.

“It’s not that I don’t think that polymers make for effective shielding, okay,” she says, planting her elbow on the table and gesturing expansively with her half-empty drink. “I’m just saying, if people are going to be shooting at me, I like the weight of metal on my chest. It’s reassuring.”

“Well, if you’re looking for a safety blanket, sure. Me, I like function over form.”

“Ouch! Going for the jugular.”

“Well, if you’re going to leave it open…”

“Which I don’t,” she says, grinning. “Because that’s what armor is for.”

He’d bet his life that she’s not Institute. He probably _is_ betting his life, and the life of any number of agents, but- After twenty years in the game, he likes to think he knows his adversary pretty well, and Institute agents have this kind of… _smell_ to them. Just a little distant, a little condescending, like they just can’t help that whiff of disdain. Quinn’s more like that hound he saw following at her heels: lots of big teeth and a big brain to back it up, but fundamentally sincere, eager to please. There’s no guile to her. He can tell that there’s more to her story he’s not getting, but that’s just as much because she doesn’t care enough to dissemble as from his own observation. It’s… refreshing.

Quinn drains the last of her drink and eyes his mostly-empty glass politely. “Another?” she says, raising the bottle. “I think we’ve got about one more round left.”

It’s enough, what he’s learned about her; it’s about as much as he thought he’d get in a week’s worth of work, and it’s more than plenty to make his report. She’s not a threat and she doesn’t have the chops to be an agent, so there’s not much left for him here. She could make a good tourist, maybe even an ally if she manages to retake the Castle like he's sure they're planning, but right now she doesn’t have anything else to offer them. And he’d make a dangerous friend for her to have.

“Nah, I need to be turning in,” he says, and at least the reluctance in his voice isn’t faked. He nods to the clock behind the bar. “I don’t get moving, my flop’s gonna be gone and then I’m shit outta luck till morning.”

She gives a little frown of disappointment that echoes the one he’s feeling in his chest: the urge to stay just a few minutes longer, to milk this unexpected camaraderie out as far as it can go. You find someone worth talking to so rarely that it’s a sting to let it go so soon. But duty calls, etc, etc. And he’s not doing her any favors by drawing it out.

“Yeah, you’re probably right,” she says with a sigh. She flicks the neck of her bottle with her thumbnail, a quiet little singing note of hollow glass that makes her smile. “I’m sure someone’ll finish this off.”

“No doubt.”

She stands, and he follows suit, feeling awkward all of a sudden, not quite sure what to do with his hands. Aside from those thirty seconds at the bar, they’ve mostly been sitting across from each other, and it didn’t really sink in just how much shorter than him she really is. He’s not used to being this big, muscle and bone and disconcerting height, but she’s also shorter than she looked at first glance. She seems larger when she’s talking, all the easy confidence in her voice and posture filling up the space around her.

She probably makes a pretty fucking good General, out there with those wannabe tin soldiers. Too bad this unexpectedly fruitful fishing expedition means that he's not going to get the chance to see it for himself.

“Thanks for this,” she says, tucking her hands in her pockets and smiling up at him. “I was having a pretty fucking bad day, but, uh. This was definitely a nice way to finish it off.”

“Yeah, me too,” Deacon says, and surprises himself by how much he means it. “Hey, you want I should walk you back to your door?”

_Why did I just say that,_ he thinks, but she’s already lighting up with a grin that makes it hard to regret. “You sure? I don’t want to put you out.”

“Naw, it’s fine,” he says, and decides that it is. It’s just a few minutes more, anyway. Nothing much in the scope of things. “There’s all sorts of bad folk out there, might be happy to try their luck.”

“My hero,” she says, all dimples, and turns away before he has to think up a suitably stammering response.

Going up the steps reminds him that he’s had about three drinks above his usual limit, and he has to pause and lean against the wall to get his bearings while Quinn waits more-or-less patiently for Ham to release her weapons again. She inspects them suspiciously to make sure that nobody tampered with them while they were in the lockbox, and then loads them back up: a ten mil into her shoulder harness, a heavily-modded laser pistol onto one hip and then a goddamn machete onto the other. Deacon straightens away from the wall when she heads over to him, eyeing her the hilt of that machete with a raised eyebrow.

“I’m thinkin’ you don’t so much need the help after all,” he says, and she laughs and hooks her elbow through his. He turns his instinctive flinch into a shiver as they step out into the cold night air. The last time someone was this close to him, he and a raider were grappling over a boot knife. He’s not used to people grabbing him for friendly reasons.

“Too late,” Quinn says, grinning up at him. She’s got just a shadow of a dimple on her left cheek, a little bit of a crease that pops only when she’s smiling wide. “You offered, no take-backs.”

“Guess I’m stuck, then,” he says, and she snorts and huddles closer, ducking her chin down into her collar against the bite of the wind.

“It’s ‘cause you’re so warm. God, I hate winter. And it’s only November. This is bullshit.”

She doesn’t feel cold. She feels very warm, pressed along his side, and it’s all he can do not to lean into her, his body finally done processing _friendnotfoe_ and reminding him how long it’s been since someone’s been this close. “Claire charges extra for heat.”

“And I paid it, believe me. Bad enough to deal with the cold on the road, I’ll be damned if I have to suffer when I’m actually someplace that has clean sheets.”

“Wouldn’t be too sure about that,” he says, “I heard a rumor once that-” She smells like leather and gun oil, and he realizes, all in a rush, what his instincts are driving him towards. _Motherfu-_

“That what?” Quinn says, and he realizes that he fell silent, too busy cursing himself for an idiot to keep up his end of the conversation.

“That someone once found a bedbug the size of a radroach,” he finishes, hoping she can’t tell how off-balance he feels. Of all the stupid, useless fucking times for his libido to decide to wake up from a nap… 

“You know, you’re not really doing a lot to reassure me, here.”

“Aw, sorry,” he says, making himself grin back down at her. Why her? Why now? She’s pretty even for a vaultie, sure, but Deacon’s quirk means that looks don't usually mean much to him. Is it because she’s experienced? Or clever? Those are qualities that describe any number of contacts and fellow agents, but Deacon’s never felt a stirring of anything unprofessional towards _them._ “Didn’t realize that was part of the deal.”

“Definitely. Protection from any big and bads who might want to take advantage of little ol’ me, and reassurance about my sleeping quarters. Didn’t you read the fine print?”

He finds himself smiling back before he entirely decides to do it, and that’s when it hits him: he’s having fun.

_Fun_ isn’t really a word he tends to associate with his line of work; it’s not like he tends to come in contact with a whole bunch of great conversationalists. Usually it’s spaced-out chemi-heads, twitchy fellow paranoiacs, or crusaders who take themself just a little bit too seriously. That’s the nature of the gig. He doesn’t tend to run into people with an encyclopedic knowledge of old-world detective novels, who have strong opinions about ranged weapons and like to tinker with salvaged circuit boards in their spare time. Maybe it’s ‘cause she’s a vaultie, or maybe just because she’s lived an interesting life, but she’s not like anyone he’s ever met. And she’s a hell of a lot more charming than he’d really bargained for.

_You are a sad, old man,_ he tells himself, _getting distracted by a pretty face,_ but it doesn’t help the way he wants to lean down and press his nose to her temple, to pull her hair out of its lazy knot and see if it’s just as silky as it looks. Loneliness is a powerful force, one that people tend to underestimate; he’s exploited it often enough to know better than most. And he’s been isolating recently, moving from job to job and staying out of HQ until everyone has a chance to let their tempers cool. It’s just bad timing, him working a target that he genuinely likes. It’ll fade.

“Well, here we are,” Quinn says, letting go of his arm at last, and Deacon looks up to the neon sign over their heads. _Hotel Rexford._ “I appreciate the assist. _And_ the extra body heat. You can tell Hancock, his people really go above and beyond.”

“Hancock,” he echoes. “Right.” The mention of his cover is like a shock of cold water, a badly-needed reminder that this feeling of intimacy is artificial, a byproduct of the whiskey and his own knack for mirroring people’s desires back at them. She’d needed a friend and he gave her one; it doesn’t mean a damn thing more than that. “I’ll be sure to pass that along.”

“You do that,” Quinn tells him. “Thanks for the help. I don’t want you to lose your place to sleep on account of me.”

The segue is too perfect to ignore, which is just as well. Knowing that his instincts are fucking him over doesn’t really make it any easier to ignore them, and what he really wants to do is step closer, wrap his big brawler's hands around her jaw, pull her up and-

“You’re welcome,” he says, shoving his hands in his pockets. “Anytime.”

“Anytime, huh?” He smile comes up slow and sure, a bit teasing. “That mean you’ll be around when I get back?”

_Not a chance._ His heart trips a beat, but he just shrugs, smiles back easy. After today, he’s retiring this face for good. “Yeah, ‘course. I don’t wander far.”

“All right then. First round’s on me, next time.”

“Won’t argue with that.” He ducks his chin in a nod. “You take care now.”

“You too, John.”

He walks away before he can do anything stupid, like ask her how she feels about synth rights, or maybe if she wants to go into the side alley and make out a little. _It’s just hormones, pal,_ he tells himself. _It’ll pass. It always does._

He pauses to light a cigarette before he rounds the corner toward the flophouses, and looks back to see her still standing on the front stoop, hands tucked up under her arms to keep them warm. She’s staring off down the street, toward the Den, and the neon lights paint red into her black hair, cast shadows into the cut of her cheekbones and the hollow of her throat. She looks like something off the cover of a dime-store novel, the careworn stranger alone with her thoughts. Even at this distance, he can see the wistful downturn where her easy smile had been a minute before. 

He commits the image to memory, the way he does with all of the beautiful things he can’t let himself keep, and then he goes to find an unoccupied corner to change.

**~*~**

Nobody pays much attention to the skinny teenager ducking out of the front gate, about as different from a scarred, muscle-bound bruiser as he can make himself without a day to shed the extra mass. He’s still tall, but the weight is in his bones rather than muscle, and he hollowed out the cheeks and collarbones, gave himself dark circles under the eyes. Privation and chem use, which pairs pair well with his twitchy, suspicious demeanor. Just another kid slinking down to Goodneighbor to score, a faceless nobody amongst the hundreds that do the same every week.

It’s only a couple miles to his usual bolt hole, and he slings his pack down onto the musty mattress before checking the locks and alarms. All secure, no signs that anyone’s come through here recently. He’s safe enough to bunker down and put his Deacon face back on.

It's a relief to go back to his usual proportions, neither as falsely large as he was as a mercenary nor as condensed as he was for the teenager, but nicely middle ground: not too tall, not too short, shoulders wide enough to go bigger if he needs to and waist trim enough that he can size downward without too much fuss. Nicely nondescript face, aside from the bald: blue eyes, a day's worth of dark stubble on his jaw and an incongruously ginger pair of eyebrows, just a little bit of an overbite and skin around his throat going soft from middle age. He's been using this one for about six months, and by now the shift is as easy as breathing. He pulls the handheld mirror out of his back and angles it this way and that, making sure he hasn't missed anything.

He hasn't, of course. He never does.

Job done, he puts the mirror away and curls up in his bedroll, angles himself so that the rising sun will shine right into his eyes and wake him. It'll be a day's hike to get back to HQ, but he's been getting some inconsistencies from some of his reports recently, not quite red flags but enough of them that he wants to follow up from back at base. Just as well. Maybe if he comes in from the field a bit, mends a few fences, he'll be a little less vulnerable to the loneliness that's gnawing at his guts. A little less vulnerable to quick-tongued mercenaries with laugh lines around their eyes and a way of making him feel like he's known them forever, even though they don't know a single goddamn thing about him that isn't a lie.

And hey, after that’s taken care of… well, maybe he can spare some time to follow up on Quinn. From a distance, of course. Amari will have her report ready from the initial memory probe by then, and if there aren’t any red flags… Maybe. He can send Blackbird to make first contact, see if she might be amenable. She could be useful to them, and maybe he could find a way for them to be useful to her, too. The Minutemen are bound to cross the Institute eventually, and she could use a friend or three in her corner when they do.

Not him, obviously. But the Railroad could use some more allies. She won't have to know they came from him.

**~*~**

Three days later, Dr. Amari’s report hits his desk, the red _urgent_ stamp on the front. He hesitates before opening it, then calls himself an idiot and yanks open the seal. He’s never been the kind of person who doesn’t want to know.

He reads it through twice, just to make sure he didn’t somehow hallucinate it the first time, but the text stays stubbornly the same. _Pre-war_ and _cryogenics_ and _child taken_ and _Kellogg,_ and he sets it down and just sits there for one long moment, wondering how he could have been so incredibly wrong.

Then he gets up and grabs his jacket. “Where are you going?” Tommy asks, looking up from the terminal, and Deacon’s already halfway out the door when he says, “Tell Dez I’m following up on a lead.” He can hear Tommy making protesting noises behind him, but he ignores it, slings his jacket around his shoulders and grabs one of the rifles off the rack by the door. Dez can wait. This takes priority.

He's halfway down the tunnel when the emergency lights kick on. "What the hell?" he says softly, turning back around. He knows that Carrington likes his drills, but this is ridiculous. They just ran one last week-

Then he hears the sound of the turrets whirring to life, and he realizes, white noise roaring in his ears, that it's not a drill. It's not a goddamn drill at all.

_Oh no,_ is all he can think. _No, no, not again, not again-_

He's not sure how long he stands there, frozen. Later it will feel like hours, like he just stood there and let them- But in reality, it's probably not more than five seconds before he realizes, _the tunnel. I've got to get them to the tunnel._

He won't be able to save everyone. When the Institute kicks down your door, there's casualties, always. But if he can get some of them out- If he can save just a few-

_Not too late,_ he promises himself. _This time, you're not going to be too fucking late._


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was looking at my active WIP folder and was reminded that I do, in fact, have some stuff ready to post. And have had it for, I dunno, a couple months probably?
> 
> Whoops.

Being dead is... different, than Jack would have expected.

Not that he ever expected it, particularly. Death itself, certainly; there's been any number of cases in his sometimes-less-than-illustrious career as a military operative that he was absolutely fucking certain his number was up. But _being dead_ is an unprecedented experience. He always theorized that he could, possibly, under the right circumstances, fully sever his consciousness from his body and continue on after technical brain-death, but it wasn't something he'd put a lot of time into considering. Even with a war on, you mostly don't spent a lot of time thinking about your own mortality. Perhaps _especially_ with a war on. When you’re staring death in the face every morning over breakfast, it doesn’t seem sensible to invite him in for afternoon tea. A soldier’s superstition, perhaps.

God, how his mother would laugh to hear him call himself a soldier. She hadn't thought much of his decision to leave his comfortable teaching position to join the fledgeling Augment program, and she hadn't been the only one. Even in the isle of misfit toys that comprised the Division, he was the odd one out: too old, too academic, too British. When he first showed up, fresh out of basic and overly determined to prove himself, there was only just the one, _junior_ agent who seemed to take him seriously. Probably why Colonel Mann had assigned him to her as his training partner.

He owes that old bastard a debt that he’ll never be able to repay.

“I spy, with my little eye-”

“No,” his loving helpmate says firmly. Up ahead, Cait and MacCready don’t pause in their argument, accustomed by now to their new boss and her odd ways. Jack's fairly certain they don't actually believe he exists, but if they think she's a few bricks shy of a load it hasn't cut into their willingness to follow her lead, which is the important thing. “We’re not doing this.”

“-something that begins with an ‘r,’” Jack finishes, hugely enjoying the heavy sigh she gives in response.

“Road.”

“Very good! How about this one, it’s a real puzzler. I spy, with my little eye, something that begins with a ‘t.’”

“Tree,” Quinn says flatly. Ahead of her, Dogmeat whines, picking up on the increasingly heated tones of the Bicker Twins front. Quinn signals him calm with a quick twist of her hand and starts picking up the pace, closing the gap between them. “Is it my turn yet?”

“Just one more, love. I spy, with my little eye, something that begins with an ‘s.’”

“Sky. I spy, with my little eye, something that looks like a fistfight is about to break out.”

“That’s not how you play the game,” he complains, but Quinn’s already wading in, putting a hand to each tense shoulder and shoving the two mercenaries apart.

“E _nough,_ ” she says, her low rough tone demanding obedience. The two of them straighten up automatically, then look glance at each other, wondering if the other saw their unthinking compliance. “What are you, children?”

“Hey, watch who you’re calling-”

“Oi, children, I like that-”

“ _Just_ like children,” Quinn says, cutting them off. “What were you even arguing about?”

Their mutual silence is all Jack needs to know that it was probably petty to the point of ridiculous, if they can even remember what it actually was that set them off this time. Left to his own devices, Jack would probably be making an incredibly inappropriate joke about the sexual tension right about now, just for the satisfaction of seeing Cait cackle and MacCready blush and stutter a denial. (The kid might have a smart mouth, but Jack would put _money_ on him being a blusher. He's got a sixth sense about these things.)

It's probably for the best, then, that Quinn's the one who has a mouth and can say, in that abominably withering tone she picked up from his grandmother, "It sounds like it was _very_ important."

Both of them droop like puppets with their strings cut, and Jack’s forcibly reminded just how _young_ they are. MacCready’s less than half his age and has probably been fighting for his life almost as long as Jack’s entire term of service, and Cait isn’t much older, already damaged in ways that Jack can’t entirely comprehend. Broken children, the two of them, just like any number of others that passed through the Division's doors. He wasn’t surprised when Quinn decided to take them on, even though she’s barely got caps enough to see to her own supply at the moment. His wife has a thing for lost causes.

Lucky for him.

Quinn lets them go with a quick final squeeze of their shoulders. “MacCready’s walking point,” she says. Neither of them look inclined to argue. “Cait, you’re behind me. Try not to get distracted.”

The two of them slink off, and their little group resumes their steady march north across the river, Dogmeat running happy circles around MacCready that fall only just shy of tripping him. Jack listens to MacCready bite back three curses in a row before he's says, “You handled that well.” They're all sufficiently separated, now, that they won't be able to overhear her response. “Very gruff. Very dominant.”

Her snort tells him what she thinks of his teasing. “It’s not so hard to figure out,” she says, but he can still hear the smile in her voice. “I always manage to get you to do what I want, don’t I?”

“I would hope, my dear, that your methods of persuasion are somewhat less _hands-on_ than you employ with me.”

There’s a funny little pause, and he has to replay his response in his head before he realized where he went wrong. “Than you _employed_ with me,” he corrects, cursing his stupid, careless tongue. She makes a throaty hum of acknowledgement, but doesn’t pick back up the exchange. They proceed down the road in silence.

_Fuck,_ he thinks. And also: _fuck this._

All his education and all of his years of service, and none of it has prepared him for the experience of being dead. It’s not even the loss of his body that bothers him the most, when it comes down to it; he always had something of a tenuous relationship with his own physicality, so if it was going to happen to anyone, it might as well have been him. No, it’s the traces it leaves behind that get to him, usually when he least expects it. The quiet places that stand out like road signs in Quinn’s usual banter, the lonely sound of her breathing, alone in the night. The landmines in their conversations, things he can’t seem to avoid and doesn’t know how to defuse.

They don’t train you to talk about yourself in past tense in bootcamp. University doesn’t hold a class on the language of the noncorporeal. This part of it, living in Quinn's ear on a mission, he's used to that. But it's the in-between times that it hits them the most, the empty space where he'd sit next to her at breakfast, Dogmeat curling up at her back to keep her warm at night. Most of the time he can just keep talking, keep up the easy back-and-forth built over four years of marriage and many more of partnership, but even for them, sometimes the words just run out.

This half-life of theirs is a cruelty to them both, a torture that couldn't have been more diabolically engineered if the devil himself had dreamed it up. He's always been the one to shove himself forward, to seek attention, _recognition_ as something more than just the forgotten youngest son of parents who already had their heir and a spare. Quinn's only ever wanted to be just another face in the crowd, a cog in the wheel, to collect as many connections as possible in her endless quest to leave behind a lonely childhood. And now _neither_ of them can have what they want. No one really believes that he even _exists_ , and after what she did down there in that vault, even her new strays look at her more like a loaded weapon than a comrade.

He and Quinn always thought that all they really needed was each other. How helpful of life, to go so far out of its way to prove them so incredibly wrong.

“Hey,” she says softly, cutting into his stream of self-recrimination.

"...hey," he says back. Clears his nonexistent throat. "Nice weather we're having, hmm?"

"You're so incredibly British sometimes," she says, a smile in her voice. For a moment there's nothing but the pad of her booted feet on pavement. And then: "I spy, with my little eye, something that begins with a ‘d.’”

If he still had eyes, he’d close them in relief. She always comes through for him, is the thing. Even when he doesn’t deserve it. Sometimes especially then.

He imagines wrapping his arms around her, burying his nose against the sweet little hollow behind her ear. “Dog,” he says, and listens to her rusty laugh.

They’ll be okay, he knows. Eventually. With the benefit of hindsight, he can admit that however much time they spent together before, they never really tried to be _everything_ for each other. They had other friends, other interests, other hobbies. It was the healthy way to be, and living like this, it’s hurting them both. They need something more, something to take the focus off all of the things they can’t give to each other anymore.

There was that mercenary, back in Goodneighbor. The big fellow with the crooked grin, the one who tried to seem less clever than he actually was. Quinn liked him, and Jack did too; liked his sideways sense of humor and the way he managed to make Jack feel like he was there with them in truth, sitting at the table and sharing in the warmth of alcohol and the basic, primal need for companionship. Jack had half-thought Quinn would invite him up for a nightcap after and roommates be damned, had been planning all _sorts_ of delightful things for her to do with that big muscled body, but she drew back at the last minute. Never did tell him why. The next morning he asked her, a little tentatively, if they'd go back to see him again, but she just shook her head and said, "We don't have the time to waste.”

He let her change the subject, after, assuming that the man’s interest wasn’t as reciprocated as Jack had assumed, but now he’s wondering if he should have pressed. He's been treating it like they were on shore leave, but maybe Quinn thinks the rules are different now. Like maybe she thinks that he can't share and share alike without a body of his own. Maybe, odd as it is to consider after all these years, she’s feeling _guilty_.

Well, if that's the case, then maybe he just needs to find a way to let her know that there's no _need_ for guilt. She won't be taking something from him just by giving it to someone else, especially not with his enthusiastic participation. Things may have changed, but they haven’t changed _that_ much.

He'll just have to find the right moment to let her know.

**~*~**

Two days later and a hundred yards from a super mutant nest, Jack says, “You know, I’ve been thinking we should probably go back to Goodneighbor after this operation.”

There’s a long pause. “Now?” Quinn finally hisses. “You’re bringing this up now?”

He grins. (Or, feels like he grins? It’s not as if he has a mouth to actually smile. Suffice to say, he feels-a-thing-which-is-like-grinning, which will have to be close enough until he can get some better vocabulary for the experience.) “You get so tense before a mission, darling. I’m just doing my part to keep you relaxed.”

“Relaxed is not what I feel right now.” She makes a little beckoning gesture at MacCready, who reluctantly hands over his binoculars. “I count six… no, seven.”

“Eight,” MacCready says, sighting down his scope. “There’s one on top of the dish.”

“Eight o’ them, against the four o’ us,” Cait says, from Quinn’s other side. “I’ll call that fuckin’ good odds.”

“I’d call that suicide,” MacCready snaps back. “Or did you somehow miss that one of the greenskins has a fu- freakin’ missile launcher?”

“Children,” Quinn says mildly. Cait’s mouth, open for a retort, shuts with a snap. “I need better intel.”

Ah, finally, a chance to be useful. “Ready and waiting, love.”

“Good. Dogmeat, you’re up.” Dogmeat perks his head up and huffs softly, then drops his jaw in a doggy grin when she rubs him behind the ears. “Circle around the back,” she instructs, keeping her hand signs broad and simple. “Stay low, stay quiet. _Quiet,_ boy, you understand?”

Dogmeat gives a soft whuff of agreement, and bounds to his feet. Jack shivers across the empty space of air between them, trying not to think about how incredibly easy it is, and blinks the red light on the uplink casing to let Quinn know he's made the transfer.

“Good luck,” she says, and nods for Dogmeat to go.

The uplink they cobbled together for Dogmeat's collar is rudimentary, at best; the better part of the collection of ones and zeroes that comprises his consciousness stays in Quinn's Pip-boy where it's safe. Once upon a time he had to do this while leaving a final anchor point in his own body; in comparison, a single split is nothing. He can't stretch very _far,_ maybe half a mile at most, but that's more than enough to scout an ambush site. As long as Dogmeat is willing to be his legs, he can still be Quinn's eyes and ears in the field.

There was a rudimentary image of the satellite array already stored on her Pip-boy, a grainy fly-over photo from some long-ago military briefing, and Jack keeps it in his mind's eye as Dogmeat runs almost soundlessly around the outer edge of the site. Four satellite towers standing at the cardinal points of the site, good. The main tower in the center is long gone, but the toppled dish itself is still more or less intact, facing southwest, wide enough to give good cover from the mutant at the top of dish four. He stores data like snapshots in motion: _there,_ a gap in the fence, covered by bushes. _There,_ an open-sided hut built up into the scaffolding. _There,_ the walkway to dish four, less than ten feet from the back gate.

_Here,_ there, everywhere: a faint whining pulse, buzzing at the back of his awareness. A wireless signal, coming from somewhere in the camp. It tastes familiar, but not familiar enough that he can put a name to it. He'll have to get closer to the source before he can decipher it, and he's not going to detach from the uplink unless he knows he'll have somewhere to jump.

After. He'll figure it out after.

"Aw, look who it is," Cait says, as Dogmeat bounds back into the huddle. "The prodigal returns."

" _Good_ boy," Quinn says, giving Dogmeat a quick scratch behind the ears. He wags his tail frantically, scattering drops of early-morning dew across MacCready's face, who makes a muffled sound of annoyance. "Get what you needed?"

"Yeah, good call asking the dog," MacCready says, not quite quietly enough. Out of nowhere, Cait's hand comes up to smack him on the back of his head. "Ow!"

"Seriously, I will turn this bus around," Quinn says, not looking over. Both of them hunch down a little into their jackets, responding to tone if not the unfamiliar idiom. "Baby?"

Jack's already jumped back into the Pip-boy, settling gratefully back into the now-familiar tangle of circuits and wires. "Do you doubt me?" he says, pulling up the photo on her display. "Don't answer that. Here, look." There's not much in the way of complex indicators built into the display mechanism, but he puts a pip on the middle dish since he's somewhat lacking in fingers to point. "This one's down, perfect cover for Cait to get and Dogmeat to get halfway into camp without being spotted. There's a clear line of approach here- yeah, right there, MacCready can get to that shelter on the upper level, there's only one guarding it and it's a perfect sniper's nest."

"Mm," Quinn says. The scavenged optics she installed on the Pip-boy aren't quite as good as the ones in her goggles, size restrictions on minicams being what they are, but from this distance he can easily see the little tilt of her head, the sightless way she stares into the middle distance. Working it out in her head, he knows. A pincer attack requires precise placement and even more precise timing, and Cait and MacCready are new to her, yet. It's risky. "And where am I supposed to be?"

“Around the back,” he says, indicating where. “The walkway to dish four starts here. The big fellow with the missile launcher is up there, which means he won’t be able to draw a bead on you until you’re already on top of him. And then once he’s down, you’ve got the height advantage and pick of the litter. All the targets will be neatly boxed into that killzone in the middle.”

“I do like the sound of that.”

“You’ll be exposed on the way up, can’t help that- here, and here; probably about twenty yards in total. But if MacCready lays down covering fire for the three that are stationed here-”

“I could run it,” she says thoughtfully. Measuring the distance in her head. “Might catch a stray bullet or two, but…”

“You can afford to,” Jack says, only a little heartlessly. He knows she won’t take it personally. It was a hard lesson for him to learn, when they first started working together, the ruthless calculus of _how much is too much_ when it comes to Quinn taking damage. It never gets any easier to see her in pain, but he learned a long time ago that as far as she’s concerned, it’s always better her than someone else. “And you’re the fastest out of the three. Terrible over long distances, obviously, but a very fast sprinter. It’s your short little legs.”

“I’m going to choose to accept the compliment and ignore the rest,” she says, tapping the screen playfully with her fingernail. “I like this, this can work. All right, kids, we’ve got ourselves a plan.”

Neither of them react to the ‘kids’ crack, which means that they’re getting resigned to it. In all fairness, Quinn is nearly twice their age, no matter how much she doesn’t look it. “Yeah?” Cait says. “What kinda plan?”

“We’re going to do this like we took the vault.”

Their reaction would be hilarious if it wasn’t so serious. Actually, no, it’s still hilarious. He’s a bad person. In his defense, Quinn _warned_ them about what she was, and against his better advice, too. _Discretion’s all well and good, but I need them to do what I say, not what I do,_ she told him, and since she’s the one putting herself at risk, he hadn’t really been able to argue. So she warned them, and apparently they _still_ hadn’t believed her until they’d seen her stand up with half her ribcage blown open and shoot Malone right between the eyes.

“Heck, no!” MacCready says, a little too loud, and he quiets at Quinn’s frantic hush but still looks mulish. “No. Boss, no way. I’m not going through that sh- crap again.”

“I _meant,_ ” Quinn says, sounding long-suffering, “the part about setting up a kill zone and drawing the targets into it. Not the part where I had to pick my guts up off the floor. Nobody wants to go through that again, believe me.”

“Well,” MacCready says, slightly mollified. “If you’re sure.”

“Aww, did puppy go and get attached?” Cait says. “She says she can handle it, she can handle it.”

Quinn clears her throat before MacCready can retaliate. “Look, this is how we’re going to play it. MacCready, you’re going here…”

**~*~**

After it’s over, Jack gives one last, long sweep of the camp for life signs before signalling the all-clear. Quinn sticks her head out over the edge of the radar dish.

“Well,” she says, after a moment. “At least it’s still mostly not on fire.”

“Timing was really on your side on this one,” Jack agrees. Quinn’s a deft hand with a grenade, but the side effects are a little… destructive. “Much later and the sun would’ve burned off the dew. This place would have gone up like a torch.”

“Tactical thinking like that is what I keep you around for.” She cups her hands around her mouth. “EVERYONE OKAY DOWN THERE?”

“FUCKIN’ DANDY,” Cait calls back, from next to the pile of mutant bodies. “JUST LIKE CHRISTMAS.”

“MACCREADY?”

“Fine!” MacCready replies, from unexpectedly close. Quinn leans a little further over the edge to see him on the walkway, just a little below her. “But I found something you might want to take a look at.”

“Right on.” Quinn slithers over the edge, catches her fingers along the rim of the dish and hangs for just a moment before letting herself drop with a heavy thud right next to MacCready. He raises his eyebrows. “What?”

“Coulda just walked down.”

“This was faster,” Quinn says with a shrug, and jerks her chin invitingly. “What’ve you got?”

“Well, looks like I wasn’t the first one to use that spot as a sniper’s nest, is all,” MacCready says, leading her over. “There’s a guy in there, wearin’ brotherhood gear. Looks like he’s been there a while. Muties never got to him, he mined the walkway over pretty good-”

“Whoops,” Jack says. “Couldn’t spot that from a distance, sorry.”

“-but I was able to clear them out pretty easy,” MacCready continues, as if he hadn’t heard him. Which, of course, he hadn’t. _God damn it._ “Guess after the first mutie lost a hand or something they stopped trying.”

“Slackers,” Quinn says amiably. “You pull holotags off the guy?”

“Nah, left it to you,” MacCready says, looking uncomfortable. He shoves his hands in his pockets. “He’s got a distress pulsar running, though-”

_Distress pulsar,_ Jack thinks, _so that’s what that signal is._ It’s so obvious in retrospect, he’s a little embarrassed he missed it. The signal’s a little different than he’s used to, is all. Obviously it was based on old army tech, but the encryption model is all kinds of wrong. Who writes code like that? Honestly.

“-so the guy obviously expected _someone_ to hear it. And the brotherhood doesn’t send anyone out solo.”

“So where are the others?” Quinn concludes. “That’s a damn good question.” She ducks into the hut, crouches down next to the body. “Whoof, you weren’t kidding, this guy’s long gone.” She reaches unflinchingly into the rotted-out holes in the shirt, pulls out the holotags, and breaks the chain with a quick twist of her wrist. “Faris, Scribe Eli,” she reads off. “Well, if you had friends out here, Scribe Faris, I don’t think they’re in much better shape than you.” She reaches out and flicks off the switch on the pulsar, and Jack relaxes, only now realizing how tense that signal was making him. Up this close, it’s almost overpowering. “Jack, what do you think?”

“I think that the good Paladin Danse wasn’t being entirely honest with us when he said that his was the first team to survey the Commonwealth,” Jack says. She nods in grim agreement. “I also think that there’s more of them out there, somewhere. Almost certainly not alive, but…”

“But I bet the Paladin would appreciate getting their tags back,” Quinn says. “Yeah. If we can, we will.” She straightens up and nods to MacCready. “Go help Cait clear the camp. Pick up anything that’s not nailed down.”

MacCready squints at her. “What are you going to do?”

She jerks her chin down at the maintenance building. “I’m going to scavenge for something a little more interesting.”

**~*~**

They’ve made a hobby out of old tech, these last few weeks, and they fall quickly into the familiar patterns of _power up, reboot, troubleshoot_. She has to kick down the door to the power substation, but once she’s got one of her spare fusion cores into the backup generator, they’ve got power enough to get at least one terminal up and running, and he slides into the system like a ghost, hunting around for interesting data. An old military installation like this is bound to have something good, even if the intel is two centuries out of date.

“Why’d you ask me that, earlier?” Quinn says, after a moment.

Jack has to uncoil himself from a creatively encrypted backup drive before he’s able to answer. “Ask you what?”

“About going back to Goodneighbor.”

_A-hah!_ He knew that if he left it like that, she’d chew over it on her own without any further help from him. He may not know a lot of things about this godforsaken wasteland, but by god does he know his wife. “I was just trying to keep you distracted,” he says, keeping the grin out of his voice. “I was being helpful.”

“Oh yes, that’s exactly how I’d describe you.” Through the security camera in the corner, he watches her lean back in her chair, kick her boots up on the desk. “And I’m sure next you’re going to say it’s just about planning the next leg of our trip, is that it?”

“Planning is my job,” he tells her. “You’ve told me this many times. I’m just trying to contribute.”

“Uh-huh.” She sighs and folds her hands across her belly. “I should’ve known better than to think that you’d drop it.”

“You really should have.” He picks idly at the encryption algorithm. If he can just get those last couple of digits- “If you’re truly not interested I’ll let it go, but I know you. You liked him.”

“I did,” she agrees.

_Hmmm._ “I can’t help but notice the past tense there, darling. Is there something you’d like to share with the class?”

“Ye- No. Not really.”

He wants to roll his eyes, “Very helpful.”

“Yeah, well, it’s complicated.”

“And you’ve done such a good job clarifying it for me.”

She blows out an exasperated breath and then looks directly up into the camera lens, the closest thing she can offer to eye contact. “Just drop it, Jack. He’s gone either way, so what does it matter?”

This is the part where his eyebrows would be rising. If he still had eyebrows. Or anything else, for that matter. “I think it matters a great _deal,_ actually.” He abandons the encryption in favor of putting his full attention on her. “Why wouldn’t he be there? He lives there, he works there, he _said_ he’d be there… Am I missing something?”

She looks away and rubs a hand across her jaw, a restless tell that’s always betrayed her in poker. “A bit. I didn’t tell you everything, okay? I’m an asshole, but it’s done now, so maybe we could move on and-”

“Quinna Mae Hunter.” He can’t quite do the drawl, as much as he’s practiced, but he’s met her grandmother often enough to mimic the tone. She winces against the weight of years of filial instinct. “What aren’t you telling me?”

She can’t back down once he’s three-named her. It’s a tried and tested technique saved for only the direst of occasions, and he’s got a feeling that this qualifies. Maybe it’s the fact that she kept something from him, or maybe it’s the tight line of her jaw that tells him it’s more serious that she’s letting on, or maybe it’s just the first real disagreement he’s had since the _incident_ , but every instinct he has is telling him that his is important.

“Jesus, you don’t play fair,” she sighs, but she looks back up to the camera. “He was lying, okay? I don't- I mean I know he was lying about working for Hancock, and I _know_ he was lying about being there when I got back, but- I don't know. The rest of it… Maybe. Whatever. The point is, he's not for us, okay? So drop it."

_Are you sure,_ he doesn't bother to ask. There's a hundred and one ways the body betrays a lie to someone with the right attention to detail, and Quinn's better than any lie detector test ever manufactured. He doesn't doubt that she's wrong. It's everything _else_ he can't get his head around.

"I don't think so," he says slowly. There's 'strange' and then there's 'wildly out of character,' and this definitely qualifies for the latter. "If he's as bad as all that, then why did you spend the evening with him? You _hate_ liars. 'The last resort of the rude and the lazy,' I believe you called it. So unless that cryo-freeze scrambled your brain cells…"

She snorts, scrubbing a hand over her face. "Nothing as convenient as that," she mutters into her palm, and then looks back up at the camera. "He's an Augment, okay? Or… gamma, I guess. Whatever. He's one of us."

He processes this new bit of data in about .2 milliseconds, just long enough for the information to reach his borrowed auditory receptors. Then he takes a bit longer to re-process before he finally says, "What kind?"

She wrinkles up her nose, playful, but he can see the wary cast to her face as she looks into the camera and says. "Even I'm not that good."

"True." _One of us,_ she said. He's not so blind as to fail to understand what that means. Of all of the things he predicted would be a problem, here in this godforsaken wasteland of a future, this was the one he hadn't predicted. Too busy focusing on the fractures between them to notice a different, more primal kind of loneliness bearing down on her. _Stupid, Jacko. Very fucking stupid._ "Well. This… changes some things."

A muscle ticks in the hinge of her jaw. “Not exactly for the better. We still don't know a damned thing about him, other than the fact that he's got a talent that might actually prove dangerous, and he was lying to get information out of us- well, me, but still. Doesn't exactly make him BFF material."

“All true,” Jack says. It's hard to tell if he should let it lie, come back another day, or press the advantage. _Well, staying mum hasn't helped you much so far, has it, Butler?_ “But you know you're not angry at him."

"No?" she says, raising her eyebrow in challenge. The stubborn cant of her jaw would warn a more sensible man away. "Who am I angry at, then, O All-Knowing One?"

The sweetest woman in the world, until you poke at one of her sensitive spots. Too bad for her that he's made a career of poking where he's not wanted. "Yourself. Because all of that is true, and you still enjoyed his company anyway."

Her face twists up almost _exactly_ like a child confronted with a hated vegetable, before she sighs and deflates. “ _Damn_ it,” she says, and slouches more aggressively back in her chair. “Yeah, okay, I did. I just… Do you know how long it’s been since I was face-to-face with one of my own kind, Jack? Do you?”

He does, down to the minute: it was the last look he got of her, too, their hands pressed to treated glass like they could reach across and close the gap between them. And before that… the unregistered teen she caught shoplifting in the Super-Duper Market a few weeks before Shaun was born. The kindly administrator in the Augment Affairs office who’d handled their discharge papers. Their unit, on the day they said their goodbyes and board the plane back to Washington.

People aren’t meant to be alone. People like them are meant for it even less.

“I know, sweetheart,” he says. He does. “And it’s not like I didn’t like him too, you know.”

“Yeah, well.” He can hear the self-loathing in her voice. “I didn’t give you the full story, did I?”

He’s already decided that he’s going to be angry about that later, when there’s not so much at stake. Knowing the full story as he does, and knowing _Quinn_ as he does, he can’t honestly blame her for it. In her way, she was trying to protect him. From a threat she didn’t know how to face, from the sting of betrayal that comes from liking something that isn’t real, and most of all from the knowledge that she’s so incredibly lonely that she allowed a spy to court her for an evening, just to feel like she’d made a friend.

He would have done the same for her, if the roles were reversed. For all the same wrong reasons.

“Maybe not, but even with the benefit of hindsight, I don’t know that you made the wrong decision. You didn’t give him anything he couldn’t have found out on his own, I can promise you that, and in turn you got a nice evening out of it.”

She makes a rude noise. “Nice evening? Is that what you’re calling it?”

“I call ‘em like I see ‘em, sweetheart, and if you’re going to try to tell me you didn’t have fun, I’ll have to point out that you’re much better at spotting lies than telling them.” She frowns. “C’mon, Quinn, be honest. You liked the man. He was charming, he made you laugh, and he clearly liked you. I don’t think he was lying about that much, at least. Nobody looks that badly in need of a good romp between the sheets on _purpose._ ”

“Maybe,” she says. He clears his throat, pointedly, and she scrunches up her nose. “Okay, fine. Yes. But just because he wanted to fuck me doesn’t mean he wasn’t planning on stabbing me in the back, after.”

“Elegantly put, my dear,” he says dryly. He can see her lips twitch, and encouraged, adds, “But it doesn’t mean he _was,_ either. He left rather than follow you up-”

“I hadn’t _invited_ him up-”

“But you would have, if you hadn’t known he was lying.” Quinn is stubbornly silent. “Sweetheart. Dearest darling, light of my life… We both know that in any other circumstance, you would have been all over that man like white on rice.”

A moment of thoughtful silence, and then: “I do like a set of broad shoulders,” she admits.

Jack gives a mental sigh of relief. Not that he’s necessarily _happy_ to find out what the problem actually was, but at least there’s significantly less renegotiation of their sexual practices than he’d anticipated. It means that different battles lie ahead, if not necessarily easier ones.

“A preference for which I’ve always been grateful,” he says, just to see her smile, which she obligingly does. “Still, I believe my point still stands. He didn’t _press the advantage,_ as it were. It seems his goal was intelligence, not elimination.”

“Point,” she says, tipping her head in acknowledgement. “Still, it’s not as if we know who he’s working for. Maybe somebody just wanted to scope out the new player in town… Or maybe they’re just getting prepared. Just because his orders didn’t go that way today doesn’t mean they won’t tomorrow, and since I have no way of telling what his talent is, he might still be a serious threat.”

“Point,” he says back. At least they’re back on more familiar ground, now. Working out a plan together, taking turns playing devil’s advocate, trying to see all sides of a problem before they make a decision. “Alternately, he could be a serious ally. Which we’ll need, if we’re to take on the Institute. As I believe that _you_ pointed out to me, not so very long ago. What changed?”

“You know damn well,” she says, crossing her arms over her chest and looking grumpy. “You just want me to say it.”

Well, if she’s going to call his bluff like that. “You’re worried that your judgement might be compromised.”

“Well, yeah,” she says. Shamelessly honest, now that the rest is in the open; no reason to try and hide, even if the truth doesn't cast her in the most flattering light. He’s always admired her bravery in that regard. “Because he’s an Augment, because I’m attracted to him, because I’m lonel-” She cuts off, looks away from the camera. “...out of my depth. Whatever. Take your pick, really. We’ve got so much riding on this, I can’t afford to make mistakes.”

And there’s his Quinn in a nutshell, always taking on the whole damn world. “You mean _we_ can’t afford to make mistakes,” he says, as gently as he can. _Because I'm lonely._ It leaves an ache down in the place where his chest would have been, the knowledge of how badly he's failed her. “We’re in this together, you know.” He tries to make the rest sound like a joke. “Not really any other option, unless you want to leave me behind.”

He gaze snaps back to the camera. “ _Never,_ ” she says fiercely. “Never, ever. I didn’t- I know I fucked up, not telling you. But that’s on me. _My_ issues. Never think otherwise.”

“Well.” He clears his nonexistent throat. “All right then. As long as that’s settled.”

“It better be,” she mutters darkly. Silence falls for a minute, but it’s not so tense as before, just thoughtful. “You really think he might be useful?”

“I think we need to know for sure,” he says. He knows she can hear the relief in his voice at the change of subject back to safer ground, but can’t quite bring himself to care. “Better that, than to have it hanging over our heads. If there’s someone out there interested enough to try and investigate us, shouldn’t we try to find out who? We don’t know enough yet about the power players in the Commonwealth. It’s either the Institute, which means that we need as much counterintel as we can get, or…”

“Or it’s someone who might have something we can use,” Quinn finishes. “Point. Very good point, and one we probably would have thought of earlier if I’d said something, so. Yeah. Point to you.” She pulls thoughtfully at her lower lip. “We’ve been meaning to pay another visit to the Memory Den anyway, right? There’s something hinky about that place. Even assuming that some customers actually enjoy the experience, there’s still not enough people coming through there to keep the lights on. They’ve got to have some kind of side business going.”

Jack grins to himself. Quinn doesn’t deal well with uncertainty, never has. But given a path to tread she will systematically hack, slash, and burn her way through every obstacle that lies between her and her goal. “We’ve been looking for someone to repair your commplants,” he points out. “I don’t know if she’s a surgeon as well as… whatever it is that she does with those memory pods, but at least she’s got the basic technical experience. As long as she’s not squeamish, she could do it.”

“And it would give us an excuse to go back there in spite of the fiasco from last time. Maybe even a chance to get a look at her lab space.” She drums her fingers on the desk. “If she’s one of them, though, it’s going to reveal that I’m an Augment. Gamma. Whatever.”

“That cat’s going to be out of the bag sooner or later. You think your new hires are going to keep it quiet? First time someone buys them a drink they’re going to spill the beans. They won’t be able to help themselves.”

“I think you’re being a little unfair,” Quinn says, with raised eyebrows, “but yeah, I guess your point is the same. I’m in combat too much to keep that hidden forever. Heavy armor only does so much.”

_Especially when you have a bad habit of running *towards* the people that are shooting at you,_ Jack thinks. It’s an old argument, old enough to know she’s not going to change at this late date.

“Besides, if you act like you’ve got nothing to hide, then they won’t know we suspect them.”

“There is that.”

“I think it’s a good plan,” he says honestly. “We’ve got Valentine working the Kellogg angle back in Diamond City, but this is something we’re uniquely suited to handle. If it doesn’t pan out, well, we haven’t lost anything but a bit of time, and we can go back to Plan A. But if it does…”

“Yeah,” she says. “We might get a whole new weapon in our arsenal for when it’s finally time to make a move.”

“You did always like to make friends,” he points out, and she snorts an ungainly laugh, looking startled at the gentle tease.

“And you always had a thing for secrets,” she teases back. “You always want to collect all of them for yourself.”

“Only yours, Quinna Mae,” he says. He even means it. “Everything else is just bonus.”

“Charmer.” But she’s grinning now, that wide easy grin that always made him feel like he’d won something. “Alright, yeah. I say we go for it.”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” she says. “It’s a good plan. Low risk, high reward.”

He wants to applaud her caution, but at the same time, the dig is irresistible. “Yes, because _that_ describes your usual modus operandi so accurately.”

“Shut your face,” she says amiably, and straightens in her chair. “C’mon, the faster we finish up, the faster we get moving. We get this done quick and we can be in Goodneighbor tomorrow.”

“Your wish is my command,” he says. Watches her bend back to her work, memorizing the curve of her cheek, the way her hair falls carelessly over her forehead, that perfectly healthy glow of her lost in the grainy black-and-white. If he could wish for one thing, it’d be to see the color of her eyes one last time.

_But her smile is just as beautiful either way,_ he tells himself, and coils himself back down into the encrypted drive. There’s work still to be done, and tomorrow’s soon enough for the rest.


End file.
